Winner of this year's Oscar for best foreign-language film,
The Counterfeiters was criticised in Austria and Germany
for being too entertaining. Apparently there are rules for
concentration camp films, just as there were rules for the camps.
Doubtless it's a sense that the films need to be punishing, to pay
the debt, although a film can certainly be both entertaining and
unflinching.

The Counterfeiters is both but not in a way that
betrays the memory of those who died. It's the true story of some
who survived because they were employed as counterfeiters for the
Nazis. Telling it is not a sin. Enough people die in this one that
we are constantly aware of the horror going on beyond the protected
barracks in which the 142 forgers were housed (at Sachsenhausen,
just outside Berlin).

One of the political arguments against films such as this is
that they soften the impact by showing the survival of a few rather
than the death of millions. It's an unsophisticated argument
because less is more in storytelling. Nobody could watch a film of
any length that showed exactly what the Nazis really did to people.
Films that do try often become numbingly banal in the violence.
(Spielberg's Schindler's List went close.)

The Counterfeiters gives a gut-wrenching sense of the
tension that people lived under in the camps but what's distinctive
is its depiction of how people behave in an inverted moral
universe. Call it the River Kwai syndrome, where a person
tries to excel in something, even if it benefits the enemy, in
order to gain a sense of achievement. Stefan Ruzowitzky, the writer
and director, has acknowledged that he had David Lean's film in
mind when he was making The Counterfeiters. Ruzowitzky (
The Inheritors) has also said he was thinking about his
grandparents and their support of the Nazis.

"Being Austrian and having grandparents who were - some more,
some less - dedicated followers of the Nazi Party, and living in a
country where politicians still get away with saying incredible
things about the Nazi era, I always felt that sooner or later in my
career I should make a statement," he says in an interview at
cineaste.com.

The film is best when he's not doing that: highly measured,
intensely observed, deeply involving. Ruzowitsky's "statement" -
that it was possible to stand up and resist the Nazis even in the
camps - becomes the weakest element in an otherwise superb film
because he forces his characters into positions that they didn't
and couldn't really take. It's intentional. Ruzowitzky feels that
we need a hero or someone to at least galvanise the questions. Fair
enough but this comes at the expense of credibility, I would
say.

The main source for the film is The Devil's Workshop, a
book by Adolf Burger, a Slovakian Jew and communist who was
deported to Auschwitz in 1942 with his wife. He was a printer who
had been producing forged birth certificates for Jews to help them
escape deportation. Clearly Burger, who's still alive, was an
idealist, although Ruzowitzky exaggerates this for a dramatic
purpose; he needs someone who places his idealism above his desire
to survive. That's to provide a contrast with the main character,
Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch, a career criminal known to the Berlin
cops as "the king of counterfeiters". Sally has built his life on
self-interest. The film's major intellectual debate is between the
strategies of these two men - to survive or to fight.

The prologue, in Monte Carlo in 1945, shows us that Sally (Karl
Markovics) survives the war. We then drop back to 1936, when Sally
is a senior figure in the shadows of Berlin's exotic underworld. He
gulps champagne in a (now familiar) cabaret and goes to bed with a
beautiful and very practical girl who needs a forged passport. He's
Russian, Jewish and a gifted artist but he can't see the point in
pursuing art: why make money making art, when I can make it by
making money, he reasons. After a swift arrest by a surprisingly
cordial policeman named Friedrich Herzog (Devid Striesow), Sally is
breaking rocks at Mauthausen camp, where the prisoners are
encouraged to kill each other.

By 1943 he's in Sachsenhausen, moved there at the request of
Herzog, the polite cop, who's now a senior SS man. He is to produce
a perfect forgery of the British pound. A crack team of printers,
paper makers, engravers and artists has been assembled, all of them
Jews. They are housed in Barracks 18 and 19, sealed off from the
rest of the camp and given real food and beds with sheets. The aim
of Operation Bernhard is to cripple the British economy by flooding
it with perfect fakes.

Almost all of this is true. Sorowitsch's real name was Salomon
Smolianoff and he was a master forger, both of art and money, in
Berlin. The timing is fudged, because he wasn't part of Operation
Bernhard until after they had produced their almost perfect pounds.
He was brought in to crack the US dollar, a more difficult task.
Herzog's real name was Bernhard Kruger, after whom the operation
was named.

The only character whose name is not changed is the communist
Burger, who's played by August Diehl. That's ironic, because he was
the one character who struck me as unreal. Burger sabotages
production of the dollar to avoid helping the Nazis. Even before
it's clear that the war is ending, he wants to organise a
rebellion. He is not just prepared to die to stop the forgery, he's
prepared to get them all killed.

This isn't strictly what happened, as Ruzowitzky has conceded.
Burger did take part in the delaying tactics but Sally Smolianoff
did not. He was determined to succeed with the dollar, as the
culmination of his life's ambition. The movie version of Sally is
more conflicted. He wants to succeed but he wants more to keep his
men, including Burger, from getting killed. He practises an
underworld code - never rat on your mates.

He's a much more interesting character than Burger, which is
presumably why Ruzowitzky made him the lead. The film is very good
at plotting the minute gradations along a moral graph - from the
guard Holst (Martin Brambach) who enjoys killing and does it
without a moment's thought, to Burger and Sorowitsch, who have
different approaches to retaining self-respect. It's a film with
devils, as well as angels, on the head of the pin.

The CounterfeitersDramaMA 15+4 stars2007Karl Markovics, Devid Striesow, August Diehl, Martin Brambach.Stefan RuzowitzkyStefan Ruzowitzky98Germany20130841209235131652-smh.com.auhttp://www.smh.com.au/news/film-reviews/the-counterfeiters/2008/05/02/1209235131652.htmlsmh.com.auSydney Morning Herald2008-05-03The CounterfeitersPaul Byrnes, reviewerThe winner of this year's Oscar for best foreign-language film puts
devils, as well as angels, on the head of the pin.EntertainmentFilmMagpieFilmReviewhttp://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2008/05/02/Counter_080502113125113_wideweb__300x375.jpg